Health chief says hospital to reopen in one form or another

The North Coast Area Health Service says there is nothing sinister about a delay in returning patients to Coraki's Campbell Hospital.

Five patients were transferred from Coraki to the Casino Hospital earlier this month after heavy rain caused in the roof and damaged the fire-alarm system.

The service's chief executive, Chris Crawford says while the alarms are now working, he's still waiting on an engineer's structural assessment.

He says the patients will return when it is safe.

"We're not using this as an opportunity to close the hospital. The hospital will, in one form or another be reopened, and reopened with the patients moving back from Casino just as soon as we've made sure that it's safe," Mr Crawford said.

"One of the members of the action committee that supports the hospital indicated that we should replace the whole roof so we're looking at whether we need to do that, rather than just patching it, because people said we'd been patching for too long and maybe we need to do a complete replacement," he said.